As of last Monday it’s become the former, not latter. No new news beyond that, just income and whatnot.

I’ve got a slew of WoW stuff I just never pushed, I’ll get to that at some point. I’m still struggling with a good and simple way to manage graphics. I’ve got the wow stuff in a folder with the perl album scripts ran against them and it works ok to generate blog-sized thumbs for posting, but the size of everything is kind of a pain. Stuff I’m posting nowhere but in the blog are actually going in the Wordpress uploader thing which seems to be working fine. At least those will be “easily” portable.

Maybe Picasa web albums or Flikr or somesuch would work. Bleh.

The upgrade is done, but some plugins and theme crap have to be updated/fixed. Also, I seem to have deleted something, somewhere. Not sure what, yet. The new version has a much-improved (and non-plugin) media manager thing so I’m slowly converting some of the blog-only graphics to that so some links may be toast while I complete the move.

The long awaited 0.2 release of my first WP plugin is finally here. My apologies for the delay, I’ll do better on the next release…

This version adds support for limiting the maximum number of tags displayed, some code clean-up and approximately 5 new lines in the readme. I’ve adjusted some of the titles/filenames/etc. to be more clear. ITC seems as good an acronym as any, so the name will likely stay.

The new version can be downloaded from my projects page.

see also: ITC 0.1
update: Someone added the plug to a codex-style site. Neato.

At one point in time I wasn’t an entirely useless coder. Then I spent 10 years working in IT and all of my useful skills atrophied. Oh, and about eleventybillion new languages/standards/etc hit the fan. If something is fugly, feel free laugh.

My stuff is (generally) licensed under the GNU GPL, see specific files for information related to those packages.

• Improved TagCloud Widget v0.2 (posted 11.3.07)

ITC is a WordPress plugin/widget which adds functionality to the existing tag-cloud generator.

At its inception ITC was designed specifically to counter a problem I was having with the native tag-cloud in WordPress 2.3. I like the new taxonomy features and I like using them accurately so I can retrace my thoughts. The problem is that even with a low-post blog like mine (~75 posts as of this writing) you end up with a massive cloud with 1019250 terms. At the time there were plenty of plugins that would limit the total number of tags displayed, but that was coming at the problem from the wrong end in my view.

Currently, ITC allows you to clip from both ends of the tag stream. On the front end, you can specify the maximal number of tags to display. This function is built into the WP code, just not exposed. The default (as of WP 2.3) is 45. On the other side, the plugin allows you to clip off tags based on the number of times they are used. A value of 1 is usually quite sufficient, but any number below the max(count) of your most-used tag should work.

To-do list:

• Add support for multiple widgets with different configurations.
• Add support for the remaining (but unexposed) WP native options.

“See a need, fill a need.”

I present the initial release of my 1st complete and functional WordPress plugin.

Improved Tag Cloud 0.1

ITC is designed specifically to combat a problem I have with the normal tagging cloud and related plugins currently available. Namely, the number of terms generated by someone who’s pretty bonkers about accurate tagging/searching. This blog with it’s sub-100 posts already has well over 100 tags and that’s only because I was distilling them down to keep the cloud small!

All ITC does is ask you what the minimum amount of posts you require a tag to have before it’s displayed in your cloud. For my blog a setting of ONE actually works perfectly! Your mileage may vary. I didn’t really test it (or code against it) but an excessively high number would likely produce … uh … nothing? Don’t do that!

I have also added a “My Stuff” page to the index as well where I’ll chronicle my ongoing coding exploits. THE HORROR!

This is my first foray into WordPress hacking, so be gentle.

update: The E! True Hollywood Story on this project was that I wanted to generate some code I could show a potential employer that was applicable to their business. Long story short, they kicked me to the curb after (what I thought) was two excellent interviews with some of the nicest people you’d care to meet. I guess you never can tell with people…

Minor housekeeping and such this evening. Pay no mind if you’re looking for actual, you know, words and stuff.

Dropped the 2.3.1 wordpress upgrade and a couple wp-plugs in/out/upgraded. I dropped the Technorati tag generator in favor of a newer iconic one. Saves an extra line on the posts and makes it nice and easy to cloud into the local site or techno. Still looking for good cloud and link widgets. I can’t believe someone else hasn’t hit on something similar to what I want yet. Oh well, maybe I’ll finish writing mine.

I was moving through the Akismet catches from last week and there was actually a comment-spam from a technorati category. Not sure if that’s supposed to be funny or sad, but I chuckled…

edit: Some days I just don’t understand…

In my previous lamentations regarding the recent Wordpress 2.3 upgrade I bemoaned the lack of good options for splicing the new tagging into Technorati, which I had already grown accustomed to using. Will Garcia over at Gormful.com apparently shared my angst and, as coders do, solved the problem.

Enter WP23-Technorati-Tags. A few code changes to the theme and voila. The already-handled tagging supplies both local-cloud links and Technorati links. It’s a little redundant, ’tis true, but I’m sure I (or most likely someone else) will find a more elegant way to present that information. On first blush I’m thinking that use a “cloud” display for the local tags and leave the techno ones in the clean list format.

hmm, that is a good idea. Mayhaps I’ll look into that!

Now if I could only get WP to automatically put ALL of my posts into the same, single, ALREADY DEFAULT category we’d be golden.

I love upgrades.

Multiple plugin fuckery, editing, site re-organizations, etc. are now “complete”. Apparently I’m still doing things wrong, so we’ll see what breaks in a week. The new mod-rewrite stuff is ridiculous - and I’ve been using it in “regular” Apache setups for years!

I’ve been tagging/re-tagging everything that appears on the front page as of the last post, which populated the new cloud. Still no connection to technorati, but that’ll get in there eventually I hope. I’m still working on getting the categories/tags set the way I want them. Shit happens, I guess.

I added links to two new special pages, accessible via the menu bar (top right) or the sidebar. Unimpressive stats, to say the least, but I’m a nerd.

edit: As referenced by this post, Technorati support has returned!

As chronicled here and here I, on occasion, make bad choices when it comes to my own personal web stuffs. For reasons that escape my current understanding I upgraded my perfectly tuned and working Wordpress 2.2.3 install to the “eagerly anticipated” 2.3. I followed the preflight checklists the the letter and even used a “preflight” plugin that verified everything I intended to use was on the compatibility list.

Result? The db failed to upgrade on the first, second and 3rd passes. A db/file restore got my old stuff back up and running again tried again after reading some of the troubleshooting instructions. Huzzah, the db upgraded cleanly…sort of. All my categories were deleted and the new cano-rewriting engine sent my crap into infinite loops for a solid hour until I moved things around. Apparently trying to redirect “www” traffic AND having my blog in a folder called “/blog” was an unforeseen function. Oy.

I made the assumption that eventually I’ll have to deal with this crap so I chose to do it now. I just finished re-categorizing every post I’ve ever written. Of course all my old technorati tags are gone now as well and the native tagging features are … whatever. I don’t know at this point. I was under the impression that I would be able to (finally) just use tags instead of categories but there are still two blanks. Color me confused, I guess.

Anywho, bear with me. I’m searching for a 2.3 compatible theme that doesn’t suck so I can re-mod everything to get back to where I’m happy. If shit is broken blame THESE GUYS and not me, ‘kay?

Also: It seems that 2.3 is dogshit slow. Sorry. If it really starts to be an issue I’ll launch a ticket with dreamhost and see if there’s something they can tell me.

edit (11:25pm): After a few hours of hax0r I think I have this working somewhat reasonable. I really like the theme, which means that it’s already in use on 99.9% of all blogs ever. Such is life. This theme is actually plugin/tag aware so everything seems to be kosher. I’m using about half the plugins now that I was before. a) in an effort to speed things up and b) because they’re broke.

edit, part the second: technorati reconnected!

Today marked the release of Movable Type 3 Developer Edition. Normally such an event would be met with much rejoicing of the unwashed masses. Not so in this case as bloggers far and wide are making with the wails and gnashing of teeth usually reserved for MMO launches.While I don’t have some ultra-huge system happening here I do intend to add a few blogs/authors to the system in the not so distant future. Given my hosting situation I would be required, per the license, to use the (currently) $199.99 version. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with people making money off of their creations but why fucking bother with the pretense of “free” versions if -5 users out of 100 are eligible?

There is nothing wrong with stating that your “personal” license precludes any and all commercial enterprises and then charging reasonable rates to anyone who wishes to use the product as a service offering. I’m not making money off this site. Nor would I be making money if I also happened to host a few blogs for my friends. This smacks of the same kind of stupidity running rampant over in the Ventrillo camp. I can’t really blame them though, who really gives a shit about people using your software for free anyway? MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY!

There are, however, a few layers of silver lining in these dark clouds. First and foremost - I don’t need to upgrade. I want to, that’s for damn sure, but 2.661 will function just fine for as long as I wish to use it. Secondly the trackback entries on very blog that inspired this post have an absolute bounty of suggestions for replacements. So at whichever arbitrary point that MT pisses me off I will look around for a replacement.

Just wish I had known about this new license before I spent 2 weeks importing historical posts into this damnable contraption.

edit (7/11/06): Obviously this site is and has been (for a while) wholly WordPressed. I couldn’t be happier. Well, I could, but that would only be if I could create/edit a theme even remotely close to my liking. Such is life.

edit (10/3/07): I have a theme I actually like now. So suck it!